


Moonlight and Love Song

by kittydesade



Category: The Wolfman (2010)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-21
Updated: 2010-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-13 22:35:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/142465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittydesade/pseuds/kittydesade





	Moonlight and Love Song

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Teenybuffalo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Teenybuffalo/gifts).



**1\. In which a grave is disturbed**  
"Are you sure he was buried here?"

"Shh!"

The warning was unnecessary. There was no one in the house anymore, and there was no one tending the family plot. The weeds grown to near saplings testified plainly to that.

Two hunched figures avoided the lights anyway, dodging between gravestones until they found the one they were looking for. Vines crept over the graves and their monuments, all of them except this one. The grass grew thick and jungle-like, the ground was uneven and rocky, except here.

"Do you suppose... he might come back?"

The larger of the two figures rose to his full, impressive height, broad-shouldered and thick as a tree. "What do you think, Victor, you imbecile? Help me with this sod."

Victor grumbled. "I was only..."

"You were only, you were only. Now you are only standing there jibber-jabbering at me while we are only talking and not digging up this poor bastard. Stop thinking and dig, you are no good at thinking."

He did. The larger man helped, somewhat, wherein helping meant getting in the way. Eventually he was threatened with the large end of the shovel if he did not get himself out of the hole, now half a meter deep, and let the digging continue. After some muttering, the larger man did.

The moonlight gave them plenty of reason to hide in the shadows, and what they were doing was body snatching plain and simple. A misdemeanor but still looked down on, and after the Anatomy Act had been passed even less understandable. But this was a body worth snatching. They'd taken the father some years ago, albeit with considerably less light. Now that he had Victor and the light of the full moon he expected to make a significantly more substantial recovery of the son.

"What was that?"

He looked around, frowning and huddled behind the grave marker of the other son, Ben. Significantly less of interest but perhaps he'd better exhume that man too, just to make a thorough study of the entire bloodline...

"Sir!"

"What!"

"Sir... the grave."

Victor's hand trembled noticeably. The younger man was pointing at the grave, and for a moment he was about to yell at Victor for wasting his time when he should have been gathering samples when he saw the shadows move. They moved, and then they groaned.

Shovel and pick-axe and rolls of sod were left behind. Gloves and glass vials and sacks were discarded. The deep-toed footprints of running men trailed all the way down from the family plot of the Talbots to the crest of the hill and into the woods beyond. The resurrectionist's body was found three days later. It was presumed he died from fright.

 **2\. In which matters less grave are discussed.**

"Are you all right, Herr Zeller?"

"Yes, yes. I'm fine, Mrs. Norrington. Just thought I heard a noise."

They pretended there was nothing at all untoward about her in her nightgown finding her steward and butler and general manservant wandering around her home in his pajamas and dressing gown wielding a candelabra as though it were a club. He took her safety very seriously while her husband was away at sea, which was often.

She listened, too. But she didn't hear anything.

"It's probably just the wind," she shook her head, and shivered because it was windy and cold and there were still repairs being made on this old house to patch the drafts. It was slow but steady progress, but she wished it hadn't extended into winter.

Herr Zeller shook his head. "Perhaps. In any case, you should return to bed. It's late and, look at you, you're trembling. Back to bed with you."

Ordinarily she didn't like being ordered about, but Herr Zeller had been like a father to her in the slow succession of strange houses, first Norrington's and then this old manor. After her last engagement had ended in a worse disaster than she would have dreamed possible she welcomed a touch of normality and a surrogate parent, anyone at all.

"All right, all right. Back to bed with me," she agreed, laughing softly as she was escorted up the last flight of stairs and to the master bedroom. The sheets were cool again, with her having left the bedding turned down.

Over which Herr Zeller fussed, of course. "You'll need a new warming pan, I'd better fetch you one."

"I'd appreciate that. I'd appreciate a healthy man to help me around this house even more, so get you to bed with a warming pan, yourself, when you're done, hmm?" One finger pointing at him as she crawled into bed and pulled the covers over herself. She was balled up as close as she could manage, so she only barely heard his muttered response. Something entirely exaggerated about fussy women and the hard-working men who put up with them. He didn't stop muttering, either, when he came back with the warming pan and carefully tucked it at the foot of the bed, making sure not to burn either of them on the coals or the metal. Which was how she knew it was exaggerated and for her benefit.

And because he winked at her as he stomped stiffly down the stairs. Poor old man, and in this drafty house. She'd have to make sure to send to the doctor in the morning to see about some sort of ointment for his joints, as the winter truly wasn't being kind to him.

It was an hour or so later by the grandfather clock when the wind blew up again, and she could almost hear how he had thought there was a person in the house. It almost sounded as though the wind were whispering her name.

 **3\. In which Gwen Conliffe finds her former paramour a very grave man indeed.**

It wasn't her imagination; the wind _had_ whispered her name. And in a voice she'd thought long dead. She had held him while he died, heartsick and grieving, and to think she heard his voice again brought back feelings of heartache and terror. Also confusion; after everything she had experienced at the Talbot home she was no longer dismissive of supposed spirits or hypothetical haunts. If she thought she heard his voice on the wind, she would listen closer for it again.

Nothing. Only the wind. The empty wind, now. Gwen curled back up in her bed and tried to go back to sleep.

When the whisper came again, this time accompanied by a flicker of pale movement, she didn't raise her head. "Lawrence, if that really is you, would you kindly either manifest yourself or let me sleep?" Fond testiness in her voice, no nervousness at all. She was a bit relieved at that. Then again, ghosts were somewhat less fearsome than two meter or more werewolves.

The chuckle that followed was not at all fearsome and very much Lawrence.

Gwen sat up, letting the bedcovers fall from her shoulders and staring at the food of her bed. He was quite clearly a ghost, and a very classic depiction of one at that. Made of shadows and moonlight, dressed in the clothes he was buried in, and handsome. Free of all the scars and wounds he had taken at his death. Free, too, she thought, of the curse that had killed him more than the bullet that pierced his flesh. "What are you doing here?" was her first question. The first one she thought of at least, though the second was _what are you_ and the third was _am I dreaming,_ both equally valid inquiries.

"I'm not sure," he admitted with a shrug. "I came to see you." So simple, as though that were the whole of his reason and the only one that he needed. It might well be that simple for him, he was dead, but it wasn't for her.

It did make her smile, at least. Rueful and tired, chastising and affectionate. Too many things to be contained in one expression, but a smile nonetheless. "You startled my manservant, you know. He thinks you're an intruder of some kind."

"Aren't I?" But he was smiling, too, more broadly than he had even in life. As though he'd let go his burdens. Which he might well have, all that he loved was dead and gone but for her, and she was clearly not suffering in the extreme. Not suffering at all, in point of fact. Gwen thought she might feel a bit guilty about that.

He didn't seem to mind. He looked at her and she knew that he saw her, the bed clearly meant to hold two people even if only one had slept in it for a long time. The healthy look about her, not underfed or underslept, no overwhelming concern or the sadness and fear that had permeated their first meeting, their first romance. And he seemed to take pleasure in it, and joy. Despite the fact that he was no longer a part of her life.

"What are you doing here?" she asked again, sadly but smiling.

Lawrence shook his head, strands of hair whisping in the breeze. They shouldn't have, he was transparent, ephemeral, but every part of him reacted as though he was touching something solid. "You look well."

No, he didn't know how he came to be here, did he. Somehow his being a spirit was less disturbing to her peace of mind than his being resurrected, ten years later. "I am. I am... well enough. Content," she added, lest he take some other meaning from her tepid endorsement.

"Your new husband doesn't hold the excitement of your past against you," he guessed. It was more of a statement than a question at any rate, glancing at her hands. She moved one over the other to cover the wedding ring in a discreet gesture masked as clasping them together against the cold. It was a fiction both of them recognized and acknowledged as sparing him pain.

Although, he didn't seem to be any pain, either. No suffering, no eternal torment of any kind. He, too, was at peace, in a way he had never found in his life since he was a young boy.

She shook her head, clearing her mind to answer his question. "My new husband believes that the curse of one family does not extend to a near-bride whose fiance never lived to see the wedding."

"I am sorry," he began, but she shook her head.

"No, don't apologize. What happened to your brother was no more your fault than it was mine, nor anyone's but his murderer's." Their father. Which she would not say aloud and spoil the peace he had found, but it was true, and she would never forgive the old man for that.

Lawrence nodded, and she thought he believed her. They sat in silence a little while longer before he raised his head again and smiled over at her. "I suppose I only came to see that you're well. Your new life seems to be treating you... comfortably."

Gwen had to laugh, or almost, looking down and around the room at all the expensive, not ostentatious but very comfortable surroundings. "James has done well for himself. He can provide many things for his wife, and a great house to put them all in. And," she added, looking back and directly at him. "He does love me. He may not always understand me or why I do what I do, but he does love me."

Her melancholy on the full moon, for one. He had never been out on the moor or in the camps, never had to shoot a wolf with almost a man's face, a loved one's face. Her tolerance of gypsies was another. But he accepted her small strangenesses as part of the whole, having been touched by the Talbot family curse and not left unscathed, which was more than many would have. He accepted that she had been a close part of what transpired in Blackmoor that left an entire family and their manservant dead and a London police inspector disappeared, without seeing her as tainted by it.

He did not ask her to be other than what she was, and that was important. She had learned that lesson from Lawrence, himself.

"Then," and he reached out to touch her hand only to stop in mid-gesture, as both of them wondered if his hand would pass through hers. Neither of them seemed willing to find out. "Then that is ... all I needed to know."

That she was safe? That she was happy, for this he had disturbed his rest? It seemed like such a little thing.

And yet, perhaps, looking at him, she could understand that she was all he had left that tied him to this world. His brother was dead. His mother was dead, by his father's hand, whom he had been at odds with perhaps for his entire life, or so Ben had seemed to say. His people were in America, dead or still performing or something or other, whatever retired actors did. It was a new century and a new age, anything was possible, but he wasn't there. He was here, in her room.

And fading fast. She leaned forward and this time she did reach out to him, with no thought whatsoever to whether or not her hand would pass through him, which it did. He was more shadow than moonlight now. "Lawrence..."

"You be happy, Gwen." The whisper on the wind, again, little more than that. "You be happy for all of us."

She was not in the least bit surprised to find tears trickling down her cheek as the moonlight spread back into its hazy beams over her coverlet, leaving it to her imagination to decide whether he had ever been there in the first place.


End file.
